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XMPP, AtomPub, headstock, amplee and the BBC

Matthew Wood, from the BBC Radio Labs, posted a few days ago an exciting note regarding fun he was having with XMPP and services such as last.fm to inform user, via XMPP messages, of BBC radios broadcasting music they might like based on thier last.fm profile. I thought this was fantastic but I was even more excited when I read another note where he explained that he was using PubSub as a mean to carry and distribute metadata about BBC shows using Atom entries as the metadata format.
This evening I spent three hours expanding on the simple chat example coming with headstock to talk with the PubSub service. Then I integrated amplee as a way to offer an AtomPub interface at the same time. This means that when the demo starts both a XMPP client, connecting to Matt’s service, and an AtomPub server, using amplee and served by CherryPy, are started. The XMPP client asks the server about PubSub nodes. For each node representing BBC channels I create an atompub collection within its own workspace. Simultaneously I subscribe to those nodes. I then ask the XMPP server for items belonging to those nodes and for each item, representing metadata about a show for instance, I create an atom entry that I store within the AtomPub store.
This means one can then simply subscribe with a feed reader to a given collection and/or a XMPP PubSub node. All of this happening on the fly starting from an empty AtomPub service document.
Eventually I will add support so that when an Atom entry is POSTed to a AtomPub collection, the according PubSub stanza is pushed towards the service (I doubt Matt’s service accepts it though) allowing for microblogging support.
The source code of the example can be found here. If you want to understand how it works you might want to read this quick word I wrote about Kamaelia first which is at the core of headstock.